The Netherlands Will Soon Ban Phone Use on Bikes
By next summer, it could become illegal for residents of the Netherlands to use their phones while riding a bike. On Tuesday, Dutch transportation minister Cora van Nieuwenhuizen submitted a bill with that goal to the country’s national legislature, according to NL Times.
A prior law banning cell phone use while driving a car-and imposing fines of up to $250-has existed since 2002. The proposed legislation would simply add bicycles to the existing language and make the fine the same for bike riders and car drivers. If successfully passed, the law could go into effect as early as July 2019.
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Cyclists were excluded from the initial ban because of their lower speeds, van Nieuwenhuizen said, according to The Guardian.
“But in fact, using a phone is just as dangerous on a bike as it is in a car,” she said. “The fact is that whenever you’re on the road, you should be paying full attention and not doing anything at all on a phone.”
According to NPR, government officials had been skeptical of including bicycles in a mobile phone ban, but the rise of e-bikes and evidence of greater phone use, especially among younger cyclists, has shifted attitudes.
The Dutch Institute for Road Safety Research conducted a comprehensive study of cell phone use across car drivers, cyclists, e-bike and moped riders, and pedestrians in 2017. According to that data, roughly 27 percent of Dutch citizens use their phone “during some journeys” or even more frequently, and a whopping 74 percent of those surveyed age 18 to 24 said they “occasionally use their mobile phone during traffic participation.” And though few are fatal, transportation crashes not involving a car are on the rise.
Though it hasn’t always been that way, the Netherlands is now the undisputed cycling capital of the world. More than a quarter of all trips made by Dutch residents for any purpose were by bike, and there are six million more bikes in the Netherlands than its 17 million inhabitants, according to a 2018 government report.
The infrastructure of the country reflects that, with thousands of miles of bike-specific paths built in both cities and rural areas and a litany of measures designed to limit the speed and congestion of cars. Cycling’s popularity has even begun to cause bike-specific traffic issues in some places, a dilemma only exacerbated by irresponsible phone use.
It’s not clear if the United States will follow suit. Back in 2011, California was set to pass a law to make it become the first state to ban cell phones while biking, but the law was vetoed by the governor, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
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